U.S. News Rankings Renew Debate as Berkeley Slips

Once again, U.S. News and World Report has issued its own rankings of
America's colleges and universities.

The magazine's annual rankings based on its evaluation of the "quality of
undergraduate education" appear in the Sept. 18 issue, which arrived at
newsstands Sept. 11.

Berkeley dropped three places to 26th among national research institutions.
Harvard topped the list followed by Princeton and Yale in a tie for second
place. Stanford was fourth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
rounded out the top five.

Among public universities, the University of Virginia was ranked 19th,
followed by Michigan at 24. UCLA was 28th, UC Davis 40, UC San Diego 43 and UC
Irvine 48.

The magazine's rankings are always of interest, but their value is often
debated.

"Clearly, U.S. News favors private institutions in its methodology. The fact
that Berkeley has dropped out of the top 25 is troublesome," Lisa Baker, the
University of Michigan's associate vice president for university relations told
the Ann Arbor News.

"By most measures, Berkeley and Harvard are regarded as two of the top
universities in the world. It calls the methodology into question," she said.

In fact, although Berkeley's overall score in the ranking has plummeted in
recent years, its ranking for academic reputation has remained consistently
high. This year it is fourth. Only Harvard, Stanford and MIT scored higher for
academic excellence.

If this seems incongruous, that may be because of what goes into the overall
score, as well as the fact that the magazine has regularly changed the
yardstick it uses to determine its overall rankings.

Every year since 1988, U.S. News has modified the model it uses to rank
universities. So it becomes impossible to compare the ranking of Berkeley--or
any other university--to the rankings from the previous year.

Last year, when Berkeley dropped from 19th to 23rd, it was largely because
U.S. News decided for the first time to adjust faculty salaries for cost of
living.

This year, Berkeley's drop appears attributable to two factors.

A change in the U.S. News model gave less weight to student selectivity--where
Berkeley, with its top-flight students always scores extremely high--and more
weight to graduation/retention rate, which benefits private institutions, but
hurts the public campuses.

Secondly, a drop in the ranking of what the magazine calls alumni
satisfaction, hurt.

U.S. News determines alumni satisfaction based on the percentage of all living
undergraduate alumni who gave to their school's annual fund drive the previous
year. Berkeley, despite its record $156 million in private giving last year,
dropped in this category to 172nd out of 204 national research universities.

Anne Machung, a senior policy analyst in the Office of Institutional
Research, contributed to this report.